Hauwa

Hauwa, 18, is a Boko Haram survivor and winner of the 2018 Too Young to Wed: Girls’ Champion Award. 

At 14, Hauwa had only recently begun secondary school in Bama, Nigeria when a small group of fighters from the militant Islamist group Boko Haram burst into her family’s thatched-roof home and demanded her as a bride. Her parents refused and were murdered. After destroying her school, the insurgents took Hauwa with some 150 other girls, many of them friends and classmates, to their camps deep within the 200-square-mile Sambisa Forest. 

After two years in captivity – and at nine-months pregnant – Hauwa finally escaped her captors and fled through the forest and a series of indifferent villages before arriving to the relative safety of Maiduguri. Only months later, she courageously shared her story with Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair and the nonprofit Too Young to Wed (TYTW) for a transmedia project published The New York Times Sunday Review. At her request, TYTW re-enrolled Hauwa in school and provided her with emergency assistance in the form of food and clothing. 

In March 2018, Hauwa boarded her first airplane and came to the United States to once again bravely share her story, this time before 32 members of Congress and at the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women. Her advocacy mission to Washington and New York was widely captured by the media, bringing much-needed attention to the plight of Boko Haram “brides” and the thousands of other young women and girls who remain in captivity today.